I realized that night why I was so taken aback by the perfectly brick-shaped pieces of short rib I had recently been served at an ambitious new Boston restaurant: not only was the shape suspiciously neat, but the texture was oddly soft and homogenous.

It was a single gigantic ridge which we had passed through, standing up knifelike, built up entirely of great brick-shaped masses of bright red rock, some of them as large as the Royal Institution, Edinburgh, piled one on another by